Blog · Tag
apmp.
12 posts in this archive.
Executive summaries: the shortest high-leverage document in B2B sales
The canonical pillar on executive summaries. Why one page decides whether the proposal gets read, the five parts of a strong exec summary, two before-and-after rewrites, who signs off.
The proposal-team staffing playbook (3, 15, 50 seats)
Proposal-team structure is volume-driven, not culture-driven. What the three-seat, fifteen-seat, and fifty-seat functions look like. Named roles, named failure modes, when to jump tiers.
Color-team review: the full playbook
The operational companion to our color-team essay. Step-by-step procedures for pink, red, gold, and white teams — when to run each, who attends, the rubrics they apply, and the templates that make the discipline portable.
Discriminator tests: three worked examples
The APMP discriminator test is simple to state and brutal to apply. Three real-shape proposal sections, run through the discriminator filter, with the rewrites that survive.
The color-team review discipline, explained for modern teams
Pink, red, gold, white. The four-team review discipline most modern proposal shops know by name and don't actually run. This post reclaims it — what each team is for, why teams skip it, the rubrics, and how to run reviews async in 2025.
A field guide to win themes that actually win
The canonical pillar on win themes. What they are, what they aren't, the swap-name test applied across six worked examples, and the discipline of constructing themes from capture and retiring themes that didn't earn their score bump.
Discriminators: the word your evaluator was trained on
APMP calls them discriminators. Most teams don't write them. Three real examples from awarded proposals — what they did, why they worked.
The complete bid/no-bid scoring framework
The canonical bid/no-bid framework. Five variables scored 1–5, weighting, the rubric template, the bid-decision meeting, override discipline, and where the rubric is honestly wrong.
Reading an RFP like the procurement lead who wrote it
RFPs are procurement documents written by named humans with known constraints, drafted from templates reused for fifteen bids. Read them that way and the response writes itself differently. The canonical long version.
The APMP BOK 2025 update, decoded
The APMP Body of Knowledge is the closest thing the proposal profession has to a canonical text. Here's what it covers, how it has evolved, and where the 2025 update sits relative to the practice — based only on what's public.
Five years of APMP salary data, in one chart
What the APMP salary surveys tell us — and don't — about proposal-team compensation over the last five years. A teardown of the public dataset, the methodology, and the gaps a careful reader has to keep in mind.
The 8-stage RFP response pipeline, explained
A canonical long-read on how a mature proposal shop actually moves an RFP from the hand-off email through submission and the post-mortem that feeds the next bid. Eight stages, what each one owns, and where each one fails.
See the proposal workflow
Take the 5-minute tour, then start a trial workspace when you're ready to run a real pursuit against your own source material.